LIFE AND WORK AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY 



On January i, 1874, we left Ames, and after 

 attending to some private business en route, 

 reached Ithaca, New York, on February first. 

 There we secured rooms in Cascadilla y a dreary 

 stone building which had been erected for a Sana- 

 torium and was then used for an apartment house ; 

 and set up housekeeping for the fifth time and only 

 thirty miles from the old homestead on Cayuga 

 Lake which I had left nearly twenty years earlier. 

 I and my family were plain people off the western 

 prairies ; and perhaps because of it and more, per- 

 haps, because agriculture was then regarded by 

 most of the classically educated members of the 

 Cornell faculty as quite unworthy of a place in 

 education beside the traditional subjects of the 

 curriculum, we suffered a sort of social neglect and 

 felt ourselves in an alien atmosphere. The con- 

 tempt for such practical subjects and their teachers 

 was shared to some extent for a number of years 

 by many of the professors of technical departments 

 who were not highly cultivated outside their own 

 fields. 



[177] 



